Police have launched a compulsory investigation into allegations that a so-called "blacklist" containing information on employees' union membership status was compiled within Samsung Electronics (005930.KS).
The Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency said Tuesday in a regular press briefing that it had conducted a search and seizure at Samsung Electronics' Giheung campus on the 8th. According to police, the Hwaseong Dongtan Police Station on that day dispatched investigators to the Giheung campus to carry out a compulsory investigation of servers managing the company's internal business sites.
Through the raid, police identified four IP addresses with abnormal access records and pinpointed their users. However, it has not yet been determined whether these individuals are union members.
Regarding the case, Samsung Electronics on the 16th of last month filed a criminal complaint against employee A on charges of collecting employees' personal information without authorization from the company's internal security system and providing it to a third party. Samsung Electronics said, "An abnormal traffic detection system found that A accessed the internal business site approximately 20,000 times over about an hour to view employees' personal information." However, A was found not to be among the IP users identified by police.
Through the raid, police also secured a list of non-union employees. Prior to filing the complaint against A, Samsung Electronics on the 9th of last month filed a complaint with police against an unidentified person for violating the Personal Information Protection Act, citing allegations that a certain employee had used other employees' personal information without authorization to compile a so-called "blacklist" that included union membership status.
Police plan to investigate the individuals identified as soon as the seized materials are analyzed.
